There is a fundamental minimum amount of energy needed to desalinate: you can't take less energy to do it,than you could gain back (from osmotic pressure) if you allowed the desalinated water to expand a cylinder containing the residual brine. This is large. This paper is a thermal method, so it doesn't have an electricity input, but to justify their efficiency claim, they should really compare against what you could do by using the same surface area for solar panels, driving a conventional setup. My (limited) understanding is that conventional reverse osmosis is not far from the theoretical optimum, energy-wise, the main difficulties being operational (the membranes need declogging). And of course RO is more expensive than rain.
This paper is interesting, however, in directly producing crystalline salt, which is lower volume than brine and easier to dispose of, maybe even valuable.
Sure, but typically desalination plants are located in a single physical place, so a discharge pipe dumping brine 24x7 is bad for all of the things around it, as the local concentration is extremely high.
I wonder what the linear diffusion gradient would look like for that. Like the perforated garden hoses or whatever for soaking soil. Aquatic organisms grow so quick though very curious on the constraints for something like this.
I liked the idea of loading it up on a ship that sails out releasing as it goes out and back. Make it solar powered or even go old school with literal sails.
I thought they tend to pipe far out and discharge as far below the surface as possible, since there is a lot of surface life and it is less damaging this way.
Ships (with long submerged pipes) would be prone to weather events and generally less reliable than an installed pipe. Perforation would be prone to clogging from build up so a nonstarter I would expect. Adding flex tubing and a relocation robot would be a maintenance headache as well. Not sure there is an easy optimization.
And it doesn't even need to be a rigid pipe. A flexible pipe made out of, say, waterproof fabric, could be cheaply made to extend miles while remaining open due to the pressure of the water pumped into it.
depends of course, how easy does the brine dissolve, how long does it take that it is so diluted that it can't do any harm, without that information it's not easy to tell
I mean.. we really want to permanently desalinate the ocean somewhat too so putting the brine back seems kinda stupid. Put it on land, let it dry, sell some as table salt and dump the rest into abandoned mines.
Persian Gulf has 20% more salt in water because of the humans which are throwing the oversalinated waste back into the sea. Dehidrated salt may be a big deal for some areas because of no waste into input.
"in mice". No, wait, that auto-reply is for cancer breakthrough.
Let me check, is that a wonderful battery ? Nope.. A promising fusion ? Neither...
Ok, so this must be the fourth kind of pseudo-wonder discovery that will maybe make it out of the lab in 20 years, if the research team managed to get scraps of funding while VC pick the next way to waste pensioners money.
Anyway, whenever they have desalinated enough water to get each researcher a pint, the round is on me.